Leaky
Our condensate pump froze this weekend. Or rather, the tubing outside did, backing up and overflowing the pump, which I had just checked a few hours earlier before Jason heard the pump running and running, and opened the furnace closet door to discover water just starting to spill onto the floor.
Outside, where the pump tube drains, is an ice dam of massive proportions. It looks like an ice volcano. A slippery, frozen, non-yielding volcano of ice that formed within the last two weeks, when the temps were below zero. The ice volcano finally reached high enough to smother the end of the tube inside its frozen core (despite my nightly checks), and the water had nowhere to go. It froze inside the tube and backed everything up. Jason took an ice hoe to the dam, but the water in the tube remains frozen. So for now, we have the tube running from the furnace to a bucket instead of the pump.
In our other basement closet, our water heater drain valve is leaking, and despite the very simplistic diagrams and assurances from me that we could probably fix it ourselves by replacing the plastic valve with a brass one, we have yet to do anything about it. Mainly because we have never ever drained a water heater before and there is gas involved and we are afraid of an explosion, so now we have an old tupperware container catching the drips instead.
Someday, we’ll get around to fixing everything (the frozen tube issue should resolve itself this week with temps in the 30s), but until then, we have plenty of Tupperware containers.
How about you guys? Any household repairs you’ve been putting off?
If I started listing them, I could be here all day.
Comment by Nowheymama — January 11, 2010 @ 2:11 pm
Many, many repairs. The most glaring is probably the giant hole in the ceiling on the main floor (about 2ft x 1ft) from a leak in the shower wall above in August. Homer has cleverly hidden it with several sheets of white printer paper taped together with green painters tape. You can probably imagine how our bathroom reno is progressing…
Comment by LoriD — January 11, 2010 @ 2:18 pm
Aside from the house itself?
Comment by Shelly — January 11, 2010 @ 2:30 pm
Ughhh. This sucks. No household repairs yet (the damn house was redone from top to bottom last year), but who knows… probably three very expensive things will break simultaneously sometime soon.
Comment by Jess — January 11, 2010 @ 2:40 pm
Nothing major, although I did manage to back the toilet up last night.
And we had no plunger.
What house has no plunger?
Comment by beth — January 11, 2010 @ 2:50 pm
We need a new rail for the stairs because my husband and a samoan guy we hired totally ruined it by lugging a 100+ TV up 15 steps. Now the wooden railing has dents and craters in it and I can’t help but think that a nice flatscreen wouldn’t have treated our new house the same way.
Comment by kirida — January 11, 2010 @ 3:45 pm
The list is long and ugly.
Examples:
-peeling drywall behind the toilet downstairs.
-a lack of trim anywhere in the basement or around any window we have replaced (we’ve replaced about 8 windows)
-A furnace that makes an ominous squealing when the blower starts up (I fix this by turning up the TV. Effective, yes?)
-we never cut in a long the ceiling when we redid our kitchen, leading to an odd stripey look
-Drippy bathroom faucet, fixed with an ice cream pail
-the TP dispenser fell off the wall and I fixed it by propping the toilet paper on the counter
It goes on and on, and that’s just the work INSIDE the house. If we include outdoor problems, well, I might just have to curl up and die.
A tile that fell off the bathroom wall that I have, and I have glue, and yet, never replaced.
Comment by Buster — January 11, 2010 @ 5:39 pm
The grout in my shower is horridly cracked. I just know that the entire wall is disintegrating behind it.
Wahoo for being a homeowner.
Comment by Emily — January 11, 2010 @ 10:53 pm
The nice fake hardwood floors that were put in just OVER a year ago broke in two places (and of course the warranty expired 2 weeks before it happened…sigh). The random “test” patches of red paint on the door done before deciding to paint the room green (now it just looks like someone has hemorrhaged all over the place). The lovely cracks in the walls/ceilings that should get fixed.
It’s not even my house and I’m thinking of fixing these things because they’re bothering me so much!
Comment by sarah — January 12, 2010 @ 7:11 am
Of the four toilets in the house, three need repair to keep them from running all the time. One just needs a slight adjustment that I can do, the other two look a little more involved then just replacing the flapper. They are not currently being used so I’ve been putting off the repairs.
Comment by Frank — January 12, 2010 @ 10:15 am
Oy, vey. A few. Need to replace the broken towel rack in the master bath, need to patch the wall behind the wood stove, need to paint the living room after that is patched, need to fix some molding in the living room, need to replace the back door and laundry room door, oh, and the front door…
Eh.
Comment by Artemisia — January 12, 2010 @ 1:31 pm
Hmm. We need to replace the old trim where we put the new door in the den- as well as several spots in the den that we haven’t finished trimming from a year ago when we remodeled it. There’s a piece of edge trim from the white wainscotting in the bathroom that the kids tore off that remains un-replaced. As well as a plug thing for the bathroom sink that we just took out when it broke, and never replaced. Oh, and you know, the GIANT MESS that the laundry room floor now is, thanks to a flooding and then a REFLOODING after the NEW washer was hooked up. That’s a work in progress…
Also there’s two small pieces of trim from corners of the kitchen and one in the living room where the trim got torn off the wall (probably by repeatedly being banged with the vacuum, whoops) that we haven’t replaced, so that looks kind of cruddy.
So, just lots of trimming, basically. Which involves measuring and cutting and staining and is SO not something I’m going to be attempting myself.
Comment by Sarah — January 12, 2010 @ 6:13 pm
We’ve finally started to work on our very long list of small fixes in our house, and I swear it’s like the house noticed, because more stuff keeps breaking!
The bad part is, we’ve only lived here a year and a half, so we don’t know how to fix some of the stuff that’s happening. Now we’ve got a kitchen light that only comes on sometimes (Gah, will have to hire an electrician), a backyard light that’s burned out, a shower light that’s burned out and we can’t figure out how to open the fixture. And I’m convinced one day the crappy drop ceiling in the mudroom is just going to collapse while we’re at work. I hope the dog is not too traumatized when that happens :S
Comment by velocibadgergirl — January 13, 2010 @ 6:18 am
You seem so *calm*. I would be *freaking*.
Comment by Ellie — January 13, 2010 @ 7:50 am